Turing Pre-Work

Five weeks ago, I got an email from Jeff Casimir about changes to Turing's pre-work.

We had previously been asked to complete the Ruby Programming course on Pragmatic Studio. I was about a third of the way through when Jeff's email landed in my inbox.

In addition to Pragmatic Studio, Turing had partnered with Tealeaf Academy and opened up 3 of its courses to my cohort:

Prep Course: Basics of the command line, git and GitHub and Ruby syntax

Ruby 1: Problem decomposition and simple Ruby programs

Ruby 2: OOP and more complex Ruby programs

My Tealeaf Experience

I learned the most in the Prep Course by far. It brought me up to speed on the command line, an area I was woefully lacking in. It also got me started on uploading my code to GitHub (I learned more than one lesson along the way).

Overcoming Fear

I'm attending a Ruby syntax is fairly straightforward and the documentation is A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Writing a program in Ruby is much less difficult than architecting a program in Ruby.

That's where Tealeaf shines. I teaches you all the programming concepts you won't get in most coding tutorials. Going into Turing, I've wondered how my coding school education will measure against colleagues with CS degrees.

Tealeaf has given me the confidence that while I won't spend a lot of time on learning what a finite-state machine is, I will be able to pull together the programming concepts required to become a competent developer.

Impulse Control

The simple programs in Tealeaf have stretched my ability to think through a problem BEFORE I try to code it.

It's incredibly tempting to jump in and start coding, only to find yourself stuck 30 minutes later staring at the computer screen hoping a solution will magically pop into your head.

The solution? I resist the temptation to jump straight in and instead write out objectives as comments in Atom. Then I map out all the steps in the program that I'll have to address. It takes 5-10 minutes and saves hours.

Looking Forward

I don't fully understand OOP yet. It seems like everything in Ruby is an object, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to orient toward everything. Even so, I'm pretty sure 'll get the hang of it soon enough.

I'm looking forward to starting Turing in a week, meeting everyone in my cohort and continuing on my path of learning Ruby.